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Sacramento/San Joaquin Literary Watershed Project

Documenting the Writers and Writings of Our Region

Fall Quarter 2005 - Special Collections Exhibit

Poet Gary Snyder has written of the "watershed" as being
the basic building block for defining natural regions, including
the human occupants that shape these regions and are in turn shaped
by them. The Sacramento/San Joaquin Literary Watershed Project is
an attempt to comprehensively document the literary landscape of
this region, delineated in a broad sense by the combined watershed
of the Sacramento and San Joaquin Rivers and their tributaries. The
Great Central Valley, and its surrounding mountain hinterlands which
make up this watershed, is the home of many writers. Some of these
writers were born here, some moved here, some moved away from here,
some simply move through. All were affected in some way, large or
small, by the region they came to live in.

The Project, which is the basis for this exhibit, attempts to
fully document for the first time the entire literary output of
the region's many authors and small press publishers. Two years
have been spent by the Rare Books Librarian in Special Collections
in compiling a major new bibliography of the region's authors and
publications and tracking down copies of books from bookstores
throughout northern California and from the wide world of the
Internet. Many of these books found and described are little
known, and for a significant number of books, UC Davis holds the
only known library copy. Collectively, they provide a full and
rich picture of the lives and experiences of the many writers who
have come to live for a time in the Watershed of the Sacramento
and San Joaquin Rivers.

While no single exhibit could adequately display the range of such
a project, the intention of this exhibit is to give a sense of the
breath, depth and complexity of the region's writers and writings.
Examples are drawn from five subcategories of the region's literature,
as follows: (1) regional anthologies, (2) fiction of the Central
Valley, (3) poetry of the watershed, (4) regional small presses and
(5) the region's literary magazines.